I noticed the same thing a few days ago and tried a similar test manually, and got nothing. I posted about it and asked if I should have gotten any rewards, my post was ignored by the ones that could answer, even though they were answering my other questions.

It is pretty obvious the people coding this seem to be the ones making all the hourly profit. If there are already 6 bots permanently at the top of the cue for rewards, that reinforces the idea. Regular steemit users and windows miners cannot even place orders on the market right now, only linux miners and linux developers can. If it wasn't for those 2 developers sharing info with you, that info never would have never even made it out to the public.

Perhaps you should focus an article on the illegal wash trade part, maybe that will get some attention.